Stephen Downes

George Siemens wrote of my article, The Semantic Social Network, that it was written ahead of its time. I don't think so. Oddpost, for example, is an email and RSS aggregator combined into a single platform, just released. Meanwhile on my discussion board for this item, Eurekster "shows you What's Hot with your friends" and Zopto "is building on the idea of foaf + rss + open APIs. It's a web-based application for creating and managing for foaf file, and the basic framework for all the identity and collaborative tools that can build off RSS + Foaf." Meanwhile, the concept of merged feeds to cover a specific event got covered by Doc Searles today - no, not the Merlot feed I ran six months ago, but Dave Sifry's explanation of the Demo blog aggregation page he put up at Technorati - so now that it has been done down there, it has been officially 'invented' - no, I think I got the column off just in time, and I expect the A-List to discover this concept for themselves at any time. A fully functioning network will be in place by the end of the year. It could even be in place by the end of winter.